“…you must reflect that it was by courage, sense of duty, and a keen feeling of honor in action that men were enabled to win all this, and that no personal failure in an enterprise could make them consent to deprive their country of their valor, but they laid it at her feet as the most glorious contribution that they could offer.”

Funeral Oration of Pericles
read it: (http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pericles.htm)
hear it: (http://ia600306.us.archive.org/28/items/nonfiction002_librivox/funeralorationpericles_thucydides_mlc.mp3)
read about it on wikipedia: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pericles’_Funeral_Oration)

Though his mother may have worried, Al turned out to be ok.

By the end of his career, Thomas ‘Al’va Edison had received 1,093 patents and was credited for inventing the electric light bulb, the central power generating station, the phonograph, the flexible celluloid film and movie projector, and alkaline storage battery, and the microphone.

~~~

When asked ‘Is it true that you were bad at math as a kid?’
Roger said “I was unbelievably slow. I lived in Canada for a while, for about six years, during the war. When I was 8, sitting in class, we had to do this mental arithmetic very fast, or what seemed to me very fast. I always got lost. And the teacher, who didn’t like me very much, moved me down a class. There was one rather insightful teacher who decided, after I’d done so badly on these tests, that he would have timeless tests. You could just take as long as you’d like. We all had the same test. I was allowed to take the entire next period to continue, which was a play period. Everyone was always out and enjoying themselves, and I was struggling away to do these tests. And even then sometimes it would stretch into the period beyond that. So I was at least twice as slow as anybody else. Eventually I would do very well. You see, if I could do it that way, I would get very high marks.”

Now known as Sir Roger Penrose, OM, FRS, Roger is an English mathematical physicist and Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College. He has received a number of prizes and awards, including the 1988 Wolf Prize for physics which he shared with Stephen Hawking for their contribution to our understanding of the universe[4]. He is renowned for his work in mathematical physics, in particular his contributions to general relativity and cosmology.